Free Pets by Bragi Ólafsson Page A

answered that I hadn’t wasted it all, and we began to laugh again at the verb “waste,” which is difficult to avoid using when talking about money; we had made a new version of the word game The Lady in Hamburg. While Greta told me about her unsuccessful shopping trip, as she called it—she had spent a whole day in town, from ten in the morning till seven in the evening and hadn’t managed to buy a single thing for herself—I began to wonder if I had bought enough in London, if the trips to the music stores and book stores had been as productive as I had expected them to be, if one can use such professional terms in this context.
    As I started thinking that, instead of meeting on the plane, we had bumped into each other in London, maybe walked into the same bar and one heard the other order a drink, Greta asked—not in the imaginary bar but beside me here in the bus—if I lived alone or with someone. I was surprised that she asked me this—I thought that these kinds of questions came later on, after you got to know a person better—but I told her the truth: I had lived alone for a little while now but had a seven-year-old son who lived in Denmark with his mother and came to visit me in the summertime.
    â€œI’m in a similar situation,” she said. “I have a five-year-old daughter, and I live alone. Or almost, I live in the basement of my mother’s house.”
    We carried on talking for the rest of the ride, and I think, considering how we had only just met, we were quite frank about ourselves. I didn’t mention that I had a girlfriend and thought it was very likely that she was keeping similar information to herself. It looked like the romantic comedy I had imagined outside the toilet on the plane might actually reach its happy conclusion. We agreed to meet in the evening, she would call me after she had had her supper, taken a bath and so on.
    Of course Vigdis cast a large, dark shadow over the excitement and nervous fluttering that I felt inside, but it had to be like that; I wasn’t going to stop now, I couldn’t do it to myself nor to this interesting woman whom—however illogical it was—I continually imagined changing the sheets and scrubbing bathrooms in the hotel rooms in Akureyri where Vigdis worked. I wouldn’t see Vigdis for several days and told myself that I had to wait and see what would evolve with Greta. I couldn’t even be sure that anything would happen. It could be that whatever was meant to happen had already happened. If she called, it might just be to say thank you for our conversation on the bus; she had to spend time with her daughter this evening and maybe she would contact me later.
    Her mother came to pick her up at Loftleidir Hotel. I had already declined the offer of a ride with them. I would take a taxi as I had to stop at a certain place on the way. Despite the fact that I was impatient to spend more time with this new girlfriend, it was too much of an insult to Vigdis to ride in Greta’s mother’s car. While I watched mother and daughter drive off, I suddenly felt that the clothes that Vigdis had asked me to buy in London were unbelievably drab. I thought that it would have been a real waste of money to have bought them.
    I couldn’t decide if I felt good or bad. When I sat in the taxi and told the driver to go to Grettisgata, I saw a dirty white Hyundai drive up to the couple from the duty-free store. I found it rather amusing that I, though I knew nothing about them, just the same, knew the name of the man who stepped out of the car. And he, this Eyvi, didn’t know that I, a complete stranger who at this very moment was driving away in a taxi, was responsible for the fact that his brother was giving him a whole liter of fifteen-year-old malt whisky, instead of some cheap cognac in a plastic bottle.
    Still, I thought he might get nothing at all.
    16
    Before he sat down in one of the booths,